A shooting star, p.3
A Shooting Star, page 3
“Hello, Helen.”
“Did you just arrive? We had no word.”
“I just drove up on the spur of the moment.”
“How nice,” Helen said. “How was Mexico?”
“Divine,” Sabrina said. She felt dirty and disheveled beside this fastidious girl, and thought half spitefully that if she had to make her living as companion to a rich old woman she would probably look and act the perfect lady, too. Helen’s head was tipped as if she waited for some explanation, and Sabrina said, “I asked Lizardo not to let Mother know I’m here. I drove all night, and I just want to fall in bed.”
“Of course. Lizardo, did you get Mrs. Castro’s bags?”
“I didn’t bring anything.” She looked the surprised blue eyes down.
But she could force nothing out on the soft Gretchen face of Helen Kretchmer except concern. “Is something wrong, Mrs. Castro?”
“Why should anything be wrong?” Sabrina said, and carrying her shoes she went up the stairs and along the hall to her old apartment. The air inside was cool and stagnant, faintly perfumed, familiar as her own face. For perhaps half an hour she lay on one of the beds without removing her clothes, staring up at the ceiling and hearing the roar of the motor in her head and feeling the motion of the car in her muscles. Her eyes were dry and scratchy, she was terribly tired, but she knew from the peevish twitching of her nerves and the racing inconsecutive images in her mind that she had not a chance of falling asleep.
Eventually she rose and hunted through the bathroom cabinet until she found a bottle of nembutal. With two capsules in her hand she looked at herself in the mirror—smooth dark hair, blue eyes that even in her fagged condition blazed with astonishing lightness from her tanned face. Imperious brows—was that the correct literary word?—and the slightly Roman Wolcott nose that took charge no matter what strange company the Wolcott genes found themselves in. It was a proud face, and she was glad of it. But then she smiled at herself suddenly, and saw and felt the many-times-repeated reassurance, how the haughty lines softened and the pride gave way, how the face became feminine and full of promises.
Madonna! She let the smile fade. Still watching her eyes in the mirror, she swallowed the two nembutals. After a second she opened the bottle and took out another and swallowed that. She poured the remaining capsules into her palm and counted them. Seven. That would do it, probably. But with a tightening of the lips, with hardly more than the passing thought, she poured the capsules back and went into the bedroom and shed her clothes on the floor. Naked, she crawled between the sheets. For a while she held her mind away by a tired effort, and a good while later she began to feel how the numbness came on and flowed up her legs and buzzed in her head. She put her hand on her own soft stomach, and the touch comforted her. The motor’s noise was blending with the noise of rising sleep, the car’s motion was only a slight swift swaying.
CHAPTER 2
DEBORAH HUTCHENS’ first look at the day was like the view she had of most things—quiet, punctual, and a little out of focus. The light touched her eyelids and her eyelids opened; she looked up into a cloudy grayness marbled with pink and gold. Awareness came upon her a sensation at a time: the solidity of her body in the bed, the coolness of the satin puff under her hand, the tinted obscurity above her that gradually became her ceiling with its border of loops and bows in ornamental plaster. There was no moment of recognizing where she was, only a gentle pleasure at the passive center from which she watched, and then later a drifting thought or memory: Good she had not permitted that decorator to become as Italian as he had proposed. She would not have liked to wake up and see fat putti and bunches of grapes hanging over her.
She heard soft steps in the room, and the ceiling brightened, an effect like dawn, as the other drape went back with a slurred sound. Mrs. Hutchens, now fully awake, lay quietly without turning her head. She did not like doing things suddenly. The unexpected and unpredictable rattled her. She liked to know what was coming and how she was going to respond to it, and so her first conscious act every morning was to examine the day ahead and plan its details. Constructive daydreaming, she called it. Her mother, who had had the same habit, had called it “doing her matutinals,” a phrase that Deborah had once found elegant and amusing but had long ago given up using. For one thing, it was not in keeping with the psychological flavor everything had to have nowadays. For another—the admission burst with a tiny acid explosion—her mother had too much had the habit of arranging everyone’s day.
Wednesday today? No, Thursday. Household accounts with Helen, then. Good. That was one thing Mother always used to praise me for, the way I kept account of my funds. I might have done well in business or investments if I had been a man and there had been any need. Tidy desk, tidy mind, Mother used to say. So, first, accounts. Second, what? Eye exercises, must try swinging for a longer time even if it is disagreeable and dizzying; yesterday there was that one moment of perfectly clear vision. Third, golf. Not an inviting notion, but should keep up the regimen, undoubtedly. The virtue of any regimen lies in regularity, you weaken your fiber by skipping. And then Helen loves it. Perhaps only five holes, we could have Virgil waiting there by the green. Would it be cheating not to do the seven Dr. Sanders suggested? Must ask him.
Anyone for luncheon? No. Nap, of course. And then, oh, lovely, the diaries with Sue Whiteside. How splendid. We might make a habit of it every Thursday, go through them all, even that boyhood one of Mercer’s. Sue has no family in that sense. Hugh’s another thing, naturally, Pages and Claibornes and Whitesides from Virginia and Pennsylvania. How meekly Sue bore the cross of poor Hugh! Though it was true she had bettered herself very much, marrying him. Still, Thursday would give her a regular escape, quite apart from the fascination of the diaries themselves.
Good, then. First, accounts. Second, eye exercises. Third, golf. Fourth, luncheon. Fifth, nap. Sixth, diaries. Seventh, tea. Sue would stay, of course. And Barbara MacDonald was coming to borrow some of the old gowns for a masque or pageant her children were in. Have Helen call and ask her to come at tea time. Afterward perhaps give her and Sue a tour of the dress-collection lockers and the things from the trunks. Haven’t looked through those for months. Should keep better track of things—getting as absent-minded as Auntie Grace.
That made her smile upward at the furbelows of tinted plaster, for she was not in the least like Auntie Grace, who at Deborah’s age had become so procrastinating that she never managed to be up and dressed before tea time.
But concentrate, now. Seventh, tea, and eighth, visit the lockers and collections. Ninth, dinner. Oliver and Minna coming, and the children later. Perhaps Oliver would bring some movies and slides. A good outlet for him, he should be encouraged in it. I will ask him myself. No, send Helen; he might be less inclined to balk.
There. There was the day, all tidy like a drawer freshly arranged. Only when she was sure of it, and had run again through its nine items, did Deborah turn her head and look toward where Helen was sitting, hands in lap, in the bow window, with the light coming around her fair hair.
“Good morning, my dear.”
“Good morning, Mrs. Hutchens. Sleep well?”
“I should think it bad management … not to.” She folded back the puff and put her feet down and stood for the robe that Helen held for her. The weight on her feet hurt—a thing that Helen noticed.
“Shouldn’t you take a tub this morning instead of a shower? I’m so afraid, with your poor feet, you’ll fall and hurt yourself in there.”
“My feet are splendid,” Deborah said. She looked at Helen to say something else, forgot it momentarily, and stood with a smile that had meant to be speech trembling on her mouth. Then it came back. “Doctor Sanders says the … body … should accustom itself to sudden changes of … temperature. I feel ever so much better since I … started taking showers. And how,” she said, fixing Helen with a humorous eye—a sweet girl, and wonderfully capable and thoughtful, but sometimes almost too serious—“how could I take a … cold shower after a tub? Can you imagine standing there up to your knees in … hot water … with the cold pouring down on you? It would be ghastly.”
Smiling and murmuring, hobbling because her feet always hurt her most just after she got up, she went through closet and dressing room to the bath, and pulled on a shower cap that made her feel queer and delightfully out of character, and stepped with a sense of independence and a thrill of anticipation into the shower stall. The glass door shut behind her. She tried its catch and turned, after a deep-breathing moment, the chrome handle. She knew just where to point it now to get water of the right temperature, and after the first chilly splashes the spray came splendidly warm down on her back. She felt that it suppled her arms and shoulders noticeably. At seventy-five one could not expect to be entirely free of arthritic troubles, but by proper diet and exercise one could minimize them. She turned the tap to a hotter flow, stood soaping and adjusting, turned it again. Under the steaming fall her body cringed. She turned the tap again, almost secretly, and was emancipated into lovely unendurable heat. Then she began to brace herself; she counted slowly, one, two, three, and flipped the handle clear back to “Cold.”
The icy douche paralyzed her. She crouched under it emitting birdlike cries, turning swiftly her front and then her back again, and standing it for another second, and one more, until finally she reached for the handle and the water was blessedly off and the door open and the big warm towel around her. Oh, she was grateful to Dr. Sanders for prescribing the showers! It shamed her to remember that at first she had been skeptical. She recalled saying that she thought showers somehow unladylike; and besides, how did one wash one’s feet?
Five minutes later she went back through the sweet cedar-smelling closet with her shoes neatly aligned on the waist-high racks and her dresses and coats each under its plastic cover. She found her bed made up, the room tidied, Bernadette just leaving, Helen looking at the Chronicle, and Lizardo setting the breakfast table in the bow window. There was a vase of Chilean lilies on the table and the breakfast dishes were the green and white Meissen that had been … whose? Grandmother’s. Nice to see those out again. Lizardo had orders to keep rotating things for a change of scene. She said to him jocularly, “Good morning, Lizardo. Do we … owe the lilies to you?”
She had not much varied the joke for twenty years. He had orders about flowers, too—freshly cut every morning. She wondered he could see out through his smile, his face was such a nest of wrinkles. He looked a little like a man peering out the cobwebby window of an old stable. She bent her nose to the lilies, drenched in sun from the window, and sniffed them, not for her own pleasure but because any expression of her pleasure would please him. In the same way, without any particular anticipation, with no flooding of the taste buds, she inspected the silver covers, the crisp Meissen, the food: under its cover the stone-ground unbuttered whole-wheat toast; in a tall glass the orange juice, complete with pulp—the pulp was important; in a bowl the specially prepared skim-milk yoghurt sprinkled with dark brown melting sugar. It pleased her, even though it did not rouse her appetite.
She remained bent a moment, sniffing the lilies, while Lizardo held her chair. “Lovely,” she murmured, and felt the firm edge come against the back of her knees, and kinked herself cautiously, and sat down to breakfast with a little thud.
For a half hour after Helen had rung for Lizardo to clear away, they sat on in the window over the accounts. Helen laid one bill after another, with the unsigned check clipped to it, before Mrs. Hutchens. Mrs. Hutchens gave each her careful, unseeing attention before she drew her signature onto the check with a stiff hand. Between signatures she sat flexing her fingers and thrusting out her arms and pulling them back.
“That exercise looks as if you were picking cotton,” Helen said once. Mrs. Hutchens spread her fingers humorously in Helen’s face like a goblin going boo. She said it was important to keep the muscles and joints flexible, and this exercise was particularly good because it could be done anywhere, during a conversation or even at the theater or a lecture. While her hands clenched and thrust, she also began to roll her ankles from side to side and to curl and uncurl her toes within her orthopedic slippers.
After the checks there were letters. The first requested funds to send an orphan to a summer trade school, and enclosed a penciled description of him on a mimeographed form. Flexing, Deborah decreed that he be sent. The next asked a contribution to one of those committees for the relief of displaced Europeans, committees which Deborah could never tell apart but for which she always felt sympathy. Perhaps it was foolish of her; it set Oliver wild to have her contribute, and she knew that Pro-America and other groups thought some of the committees communistic. Still, she did feel sorry for people driven from their homes, and it was the Communists—wasn’t it?—who had driven the Hungarians out. So how could this committee be communistic? Send them a hundred dollars, she told Helen. A third communication wanted letters written to her Congressman and to the chairmen of certain continuing committees of Congress. This should be done in advance of the convening of the next session, and had to do with Indian reservations. Look into it, and if you think so, send a letter, Deborah told Helen. I do think it terrible how we have treated the Indians.
She resumed the flex and thrust of her hands. “Nothing more?”
“No more letters. There’s only that problem of Mr. Cantelli.”
“Mr. Cantelli?”
“Who took care of the fine bindings. Who died.”
“Oh,” Deborah said. “Oh dear, yes.” She looked at Helen’s tanned, softly smiling face and groped for the response that would be right. The problem had come up too suddenly. “Oh …” she said. “Have we … sent flowers?”
Helen laughed. “Oh, yes, Mrs. Hutchens. He died a month ago, you remember. But according to your checkbooks it’s time to have the bindings treated again, and he isn’t available.”
“And we haven’t … anyone else.”
“No.”
It seemed a difficult thing. Obviously one did not go out and find a man to care for fine books the way one located a gardener or driver. She supposed the agencies had few such persons. Cautiously she said, “Where, do you suppose? Who might … know?”
“If you don’t have anyone in mind, I can call the Stanford library, or maybe the Grabhorn Press in the City, and see if they know anyone.”
“Yes,” Deborah said. “Please do.” She hung a moment, struck by the most sudden and glorious idea. “Do you suppose … do you suppose we might find someone who could do the books and also the … family papers?”
“You mean catalogue the diaries and all those?”
“Yes, and perhaps the collections, too.”
“I shouldn’t think it would be too hard to find someone.”
“I wish us to!” Deborah cried. “I have been wishing for ever so long that … those things were in order.”
“Good. I’ll see what I can do.” She gathered her papers and stood smiling. “You’re very decisive and efficient this morning.”
“Don’t you … think so?” Deborah said. “It’s the showers, I believe.” Her fingers, weary, quit working and lay in her lap. “I have another idea. What if I … dressed up for reading the diaries? Would that be too giddy for an old party like me? You remember that brocade of … Aunt Sarah’s, the one with the peplum? Once I had it made over to fit me, for a party. What if I … got into that and surprised Sue Whiteside? Wouldn’t she be astonished if she came in and was … greeted by Sarah Wolcott, straight out of the year 1871? Why don’t I?”
“I think that’s a wonderful idea.”
“I will!” Deborah said. “And the … diamonds, the rose ones. They were Grandmother’s, not Aunt Sarah’s, but … even so. Shall we look at them?”
She hobbled to the bureau and got the key and unlocked the metal door in the wall. Inside were tray drawers lined with white velvet, two tiers of ten drawers each, and in the drawers were all the jewels that had come to her, everything owned by anyone in the family: brooches and lavalieres, pins, necklaces, earrings, the tiara that Grandmother Wolcott had worn at a ball in the London Guildhall when Queen Victoria was present. She stirred them with her finger, opening drawer after drawer: cameos and emeralds and diamonds, a cat’s-eye ring her father had given her mother in Nice, the black pearls that Uncle Mercer had brought back from the Persian gulf for her mother’s wedding, a whole drawer of old fashioned round gold beads, earrings in the shape of love knots, loops, coins, drops, most of them for pierced ears. In another drawer gold pins, in another diamond bracelets, in still another a dozen engraved and enameled breast watches, in yet another cairngorms from Scotland and amber from the Baltic coast. What a lot of the family was in those drawers! It was as if the generations had been boiled down into a crystalline essence and deposited there.
At her elbow Helen said, “Every time I see those I doubt my eyesight.” Deborah smiled over her shoulder; she loved to look, herself.
Emeralds glinted green from a tray that was opened and closed again, and then from the bottom drawer, a flicker of tinted light, Deborah drew the rose diamonds—earrings, necklace, and brooch of matched and graduated stones. Their size always astonished her; Grandfather Wolcott had been the lavish one of the family, though he had also been the original money maker. The heavy necklace hung across her palm, faintly and purely tinged with rose when no facet caught the light, but exploding in flashes of red and yellow and blue when she moved.
“Please wear them,” Helen said. “I’ll feel as if I were in the Tower of London.”
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Deborah said. “It’s curious, I never cared especially for money, it never gave me any … pleasure. I like things, like these.” With a sidelong glance she added, “You think I like things too much.”
